This book focuses on a break that constituted a change of fundamental importance in the history of European cultures: the morphological transformation of the millenarian anti-Jewish Christian tradition, shaped between the fourth and fifth centuries, into a new anti-Semitism that grew from hostility to the legal emancipation of the Jews in the late eighteenth century. Emancipation was won in 1791 for the first time, following the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in revolutionary France. After a few years, the anti-Semitic propaganda opposed emancipation by launching a frontal attack against the rights of citizenship and those who were considered responsible for it: the thinkers of the Enlightenment, above all, the writers of the German Aufklärung and the Jewish German Haskalah, together with their interlocutors, the philosophes and chrétiens éclairés, on the other side of the Rhine. The constitutional state and political emancipation eliminated the discrimination that for centuries had guaranteed the segregation of the Jewish communities from Christian societies of Europe. It also removed the control over the banking, commercial, and financial activities of the Jews that the monarchies had exploited to sustain their courts. So with the advent of the market society, the old stereotype of Jewish usury was transformed into an attack on what economists and sociologists later called “capitalism.” The anti-Semites identified the capitalists with the Jewish financiers and therefore made the latter the scapegoats for the crises of the modern industrial economy, caused, according to them, by financial speculation, that is, usury.
My hypothesis is that this anti-Semitic anticapitalist literature arose in the context of the intransigent Catholic reaction against the revolution in political rights, the free market, and secularization. For instance, in 1806 Viscount Louis de Bonald began the propaganda campaign against the Jews of the French Empire and the Kingdom of Italy, which soon led to grave limitations on the legal equality and citizenship rights of the Jews. This was the new paradigm that arose in those years: the old enemies of Christianity had become equal to all other citizens and in fact constituted a hostile power within the national Christian community; thanks to the democratic guarantees they had obtained, the Jews could now with impunity conspire to use their economic power to conquer political power. As a consequence, the fight against “Jewish” capitalism should have been directed against its main protectors, namely, liberal institutions and the constitutional state.
This paradigm spread in the early decades of the ninetheenth century via intransigent Catholic texts and among the antiliberal “social” economists and the authors of the church’s social doctrine; then a Fourierist writer, Alphonse Toussenel, appropriated it around 1845. With the work of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the paradigm circulated widely among the socialist associations of skilled and unskilled craftsmen and workers. Proudhon, an economist, was fully aware of the Christian social doctrine’s hostility to free market. In the last decades of the century, this paradigm reappeared anew in the texts of the Catholic and nationalist writer Édouard Drumont, in the proclamations of the Christian Social propagandists of the Habsburg Empire, and in the literature of the anti-Semitic German leagues and of some socialists of Lombardy and Veneto, Italy. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a late expression of this history. In the syndicalist and nationalist texts, and in particular in those of the Italian Paolo Orano (and also those of Maurice Barrès), the new anti-Semitic paradigm reappeared in its final version, the one that fueled the press campaign preceding the anti-Jewish legislation in Central Europe and Italy between 1933 and 1938.
The foregoing is a summary of this book. In studying the relevant texts and documents, the main difficulty was maintaining a detached stance in order to avoid errors of anachronism, such as interpreting the words of the authors and protagonists according to their meaning today. The risk of anachronism is highest in the case of the word “usury,” which played a decisive role in the representation of the Jews as enemies of society. This interpretative precaution led me to single out the texts, documents, and sources that contributed to the definition of the comprehensive ideology as “anti-Jewish and anticapitalist” (and not simply “anti-Semitic”). I do not use the term “anti-Jewish anti capitalist paradigm” as a general concept but as the result of detailed and philological analysis of texts and the consequent attempt to arrive at a generalization and interpretation. The only way to deal with the great quantity of texts, documents, and sources of anti-Jewish literature and propaganda (sources often published but later forgotten) is a firsthand analysis of a limited series of them, identified by my specific question. For example, the text Bonald wrote in 1806 is where I began my reconstruction. Taking it as a starting point, I initiated a journey that enabled me to connect this text with the other documents I analyzed: a journey from west to east (and vice versa) and then from Northern to Southern Europe and a journey in time, from the end of the eighteenth to the middle of the twentieth century. I took the specific details of Bonald’s text as connecting points (Ansatzpunkte), that is, “the specific points—as Auerbach argued—that can provide the seeds for a detailed research program provided with a generalizing potential.”1 Bonald’s text constitutes the circumscribed concrete point of departure for identifying a specific variant in the larger steam of anti-Semitism. What I am presenting here, in other words, is an anti-Jewish paradigm constructed on arguments of hostility toward the new market economy and the expression of the reaction by a part of society to the market itself, by the identification of the power of the market with finance (and finance with the Jews). It is not possible to attain this generalizing potential through a monographic approach or focusing on the oeuvre of a single author, which can instead be used only as a starting point, a case study with a centrifugal radiation force. What seems to me important to underline is that that old anti-Jewish and anticapitalist paradigm was widespread, from the beginning of the nineteenth century up to World War II, both in scholarly material and as propaganda literature, in the texts of important politicians, theologians, and academics and in the articles of popular journalists, agitators, and propagandists. The paradigm had a wide circulation moving “downward” and simultaneously “upward” in the social and cultural scale, crossing very different ideological fields, such as intransigent Catholic literature, reactionary politics against the Enlightenment, socialist and revolutionary syndicalist movements, and nationalist fascist parties. This wide circulation can be explained in some cases by contacts and meetings among the authors and therefore by the reception of some texts in certain political circles and social movements. In other cases these contacts are impossible to verify, yet, also in these cases, the degree of conceptual and morphological correspondence between the texts is absolutely evident, as is the presence of identical rhetorical structures and analogous arguments that mark the anti-Jewish, anticapitalist paradigm. In other words, the same structures are present in documents from different ideological fields and political families.
But using general concepts (for example, “social racism” or “left-wing anti-Semitism”) in order to classify the sources and define the rhetorical structures would not by itself lead to rigorous conclusions. Adorno and Horkheimer argued that while there was no longer any need for economic domination, the Jews had been marked out as the absolute object of domination “pure and simple”; for this reason, according to them, no economic or social interpretation of the hatred toward the Jews would be possible. Anti-Semitism is an attitude of hatred toward the process of assimilation and the mimetic behavior of the Jews and therefore a manifestation of the deep roots of that hatred in our civilization, which still remain obscure.2 I think that Adorno and Horkheimer were right about this last point but not the first one because some manifestations of anti-Semitism (for example, within the nineteenth-century European working-class movement) can sometimes also be explained in economic terms, as has been done by Silberner, Lichtheim, and Rojahn (the same type of explanation has recently been proposed by Pierre Birnbaum in relation to the anti-Semitism of French shopkeepers, craftsmen, and peasants).3 These interpreters link anti-Semitism with the economic hardship of some particular social groups facing the fluctuations of the market economy. Yet they propose concepts that are too general, such as “socialist anti-Semitism” or “social anti-Semitism,” by which they cannot explain, for instance, why anti-Semitism began declining among European socialists precisely after the affaire Dreyfus, even if the economic crises certainly did not disappear and the official position of the Socialist International toward democracy did not change much.4 The explanations for the explosions of social hatred toward the Jews that link these explosions with economic crises are sometimes useful but never sufficient. The main protagonists of the European anti-Semitic movements belonged to the new nationalist and “revolutionary” right-wing parties and movements, which have been studied by Zeev Sternhell,5 but these movements often used the arguments of the socialists Toussenel and Proudhon, taken up again at the end of the nineteenth century by certain leading figures of the working-class and socialist movement: in this case, the Right used the rhetoric of the Left. The followers of the “revolutionary right” were certainly proud to be anti-Enlightenment, but the hostility toward the Enlightenment was in those years common among very different ideological “families.”6 The counter-Enlightenment continued (in fact, it has expanded) even after the World War II, in particular in the final decades of the twentieth century: I am thinking of the texts of the neoliberal economists who opposed excessive legislation on the part of the state and the construction of complex legal systems; it is not pure chance that these authors have been accused of representing today the new intransigent Right.7 Albert O. Hirschman, for instance, has shown that between 1789 and 1989 the reaction against the rights of citizenship, then universal suffrage, and finally the welfare state has persistently used the same rhetoric and the same arguments.8 Nor do these interpretative contributions help us to resolve our problem, namely explaining the foundation of anti-Jewish anticapitalism and the hostility to political emancipation based on the myth of an economic conspiracy. George L. Mosse wrote rightly that this myth arose within nineteenth-century “neo-Christian” conceptions (but he does not tell us precisely when and where it arose),9 but scholars often have described in much more general terms a certain “anti-Semitism” of the European anticapitalist left-wing groups without explaining it.10 Finally, in recent years, anti-Semitism has been defined as a “discursive practice”11 or a rhetoric that has always used the same categories, the same tropes and images, the same arguments,12 which could have been used by different actors—authors, groups, and movements that might belong just as easily to right- or left-wing European groups. “Right-wing” and “left-wing” groupings are categories that arose at the beginning of the nineteenth century in the French parliamentary political debate; they had nothing to do with social-class divisions or with the social position of the Jews.13 As Marcel Gauchet wrote, “Right” and “Left” have belonged to the parlance of the protagonists of parliamentary history since the nineteenth century and therefore cannot be used as interpretative categories and transferred into scientific language. In my view, they have no historical significance, and it would make no sense to talk about an anti-Semitism of the “Left” as if it constituted a single and unique historical subject, always identical to itself since the beginning of the nineteenth century. It is highly inaccurate to use the same category (“the Left”) for defining very different political entities, such as, for instance, the 1830 republicans, the socialists of the Second International,14 and the communist parties of the second half of the twentieth century (some of them very critical of the state of Israel).15
I can now return to the problem of the interpretative definition. I remember Pierre Vidal-Naquet with affection. On various occasions I listened to his lectures; I have read his texts and had an unforgettable meeting with him. Vidal-Naquet was the first scholar to use the formula “anti-Jewish anticapitalism” in order to describe the manifestations of hatred toward the Jews, identified with modern finance.16 I think the formula is correct. It enables us to resolve the problem of the gap between the resilience of words and their shifting meanings in the course of time.17 Only the use of rigorous terminology can help a historian tackle the intrinsic weakness of historiography. The crucial problem facing a comparative history of the hatred toward the Jews is therefore not only underlining all the differences among the manifestations of that hatred but also proposing words and definitions that are different from the actors’ words and categories. The historian’s point of view is that of a scholar who examines societies, cultures, or languages in a comparative perspective; since the input comes from the present time, anachronism is inevitably the main problem. Historians try to achieve a reconstruction of a given society or a culture of the past or the specific language of an age, and their task is to remove any historical arbitrariness in interpreting texts.18 This self-vigilance is paramount in order to understand the meaning that the word “usury” had in the nineteenth-century documents that I use in this book: it no longer designated the traditional activities of money lending, but acquired (as early as the third decade of the nineteenth century) the meaning of banking activities and financial speculation. I have tried to establish the connections between, and the transformations of, the language Bonald used in 1806 (the accusation against the new Jewish usury, “la nouvelle usure juive”); that of Toussenel in 1845 (the identification of the Jew as a banker and a merchant “juif comme banquier et marchand”); and that of the authors who define themselves as “anti-Semitic” in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. I maintain that Bonald’s 1806 text, while still using the language of the anti-Judaic Christian tradition (and, therefore, the word “usury”), launches a novel attack, one against legal emancipation, which, as the accusation went, would have enabled the Jews to play a very dangerous social function in a context of new political freedoms. Bonald’s 1806 text contains already the bases for the identification of the Jews with bankers, merchants, and capitalists because it concocts already the nucleus of a new “anti-Jewish anticapitalism.” Hence, the category “anti-Jewish anticapitalism” is based on the analysis of the language of those texts, their period, and their context, but it does not reproduce that language.
I have to provide an analogous consideration of the word “anti-Semite.” The actors of the movements hostile to the Jews probably began to define themselves as anti-Semites after the publication of an 1879 book by the German journalist Wilhelm Marr, which I will analyze in chapter 1. The populist Maurice Barrès, the socialist August Chirac, the Catholic nationalist Edouard Drumont, and the revolutionary syndicalist Paolo Orano, different as they were, defined themselves as anti-Semites, but their self-definition cannot be endorsed by a historian without some critical specification. The risk of using the word “anti-Semite” as it appears in documents and texts that are associated with hostility and hatred toward the Jews consists in echoing a term used in the sources that may conceal many different meanings. In this book, I have thus tried to propose a precise meaning of this kind of hatred. Carlo Ginzburg has observed that the linguist and anthropologist Kenneth Pike defined the perspective and language of the social actors studied in their context as an “emic” (from “phonemic”) terminology: “anti-Semitism” belongs to this perspective because it is a term by which the protagonists defined themselves. On the other hand, the definition of “anti-Jewish anticapitalism” is not in the sources but belongs to a rigorous analytical language; it belongs to the perspective that Pike defined as “etic” (from “phonetic”). The latter is the only perspective that enables us to escape the language of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the self-definitions of the protagonists; it allows us to reconsider on different bases the long and sinuous history of the cultures that led to Auschwitz.19 Historical interpretation places itself on the level of scientific language, detached from that of its sources, but it cannot confine itself completely to linguistic investigation. It has also to consider the specific culture of the protagonists. Historiography is based on a dialectic between the language of the observer (the scholar) and the perspective of the observed (the actors). Hence, the study of people in their own time cannot disregard the emic level, which has to be included in the interpretation. A methodological clarification can help explain the title of this book, which undoubtedly mirrors the language of the protagonists, in this case the enemies of the anti-Semites: the formula, which at the end of the nineteenth century defined anti-Semitism as the “socialism of imbeciles” (or rather “of the imbecile”) was actually used by a leading German socialist, August Bebel, when he was interviewed in 1894 by Hermann Bahr: “der Sozialismus der dummen Kerls.” Bebel had probably taken it from Ferdinand Kronewetter, an Austrian member of the parliament who opposed, as a democratic position, the Christian-Social anti-Semite Karl Lueger, Adolf Hitler’s political mentor.20 The “socialism of the imbecile” appears to be only one of the diverse social (that is to say, cultural) reactions against the catastrophic impact of the birth of the market economy: the reaction that identified the cause of that catastrophe with the emancipation of the European Jews. As Hannah Arendt noted, that reaction aimed at guaranteeing the permanence of the ancien régime. The French texts that presented this reaction were also important sources for the fabrication of a false document about the anti-Jewish conspiracy, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, by Russian journalists and secret agents. Regarding this text, Michel Bounan has formulated the hypothesis that the Protocols were “the police forgery of a revolutionary tumult.” This presupposes precisely the definition, proposed by Bebel, of anti-Semitism as the “socialism of fools,” but, at the same time, “it goes much further” as Ginzburg writes. For Bounan, the forgery of a revolutionary project conceals a real conspiracy, namely, the plan of the modern powers to control the whole of social life and political institutions by manipulating even the opposition to power, by neutralizing the role of the controlling institutions of the state administration, by making politics opaque, by reducing the effect of every expression of public opinion.21 The French prehistory of the Protocols and the genealogy of the “socialism of the imbecile” enable us to really “go further,” but in a different sense from the one understood by Bounan. In a study like mine, which strives to remain as detached as possible from the emic perspective, or the mental horizon of the protagonists of those times, the philological methodology is central. This methodology is not concerned with literary writings but especially and mainly with economic and political writings from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, and historiography remains the most important guide to containing the temptation of introducing “hypostatized, abstract concepts.”22 The choice of Bebel’s phrase in the title of this book means that, despite the urgency of looking for a scientific interpretation, my essay deals with contingent, historical truths at their basic level.
In the history of the cultural roots of the persecution of the European Jews, the issue of the historical truth has much broader implications than in any other historical topic. The history of the “socialism of the imbecile” (or “of the imbeciles”) did not end at Auschwitz. It did not end in 1945; the manifestations of the anti-Semites have continued in Europe in the following decades and have even intensified in the last twenty years. The mechanisms of falsification also did not stop in after the 1930s, the time of the greatest success of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion; they continue today to act through the manipulation of memory and the denial of historical truth. Historiographical negationism—the denial of established historical fact—is the new anti-Semitic literature of the post-Auschwitz historical period. This new model of falsification can only be defeated by historiography, namely, the search for the truth: by revealing the history of the persecution and integrating it in the history of totalitarian Europe.23 For this reason, it is absolutely necessary to start from an awareness of what anti-Jewish propaganda, the falsification of documents, the denial of rights, and the persecution and extermination of the European Jews have meant: the collapse of ethics within European civilization. At the moment when principles collapsed within the old European civilization, ethical codes and norms, which had been considered indestructible, could be altered “without too many problems,” as Hannah Arendt wrote.24 It is crucial to realize that the collapse of the morality of the old world of “civilized” Europe has continued after 1945: the mechanisms and procedures of falsification wreak irreparable harm even today. Historiographically groundless, negationism represents a terrible threat not only for the most important twentieth-century historiographic and legal achievements (i.e., Nuremberg’s verdicts) but also for moral truth: as the “paradigm of extreme injustice,” the genocide of the Jewish people represents a moral truth threatened directly by negationism and indirectly (and thus more insidiously) by neo-skeptical culture.25 Old anti-Jewish propaganda and newly fabricated false documents that deny the persecution of the European Jews are different forms of the same deception. The texts of nineteenth-century literature and anti-Semitic propaganda that offered a false representation of the Jews provides the materials for a forgery that claims to prove an event that had never occurred: the Jewish conspiracy. But the myth that that false document succeeded in creating was not unreal: despite being a product of falsification, the myth functioned like a real event that produced historical effects that were just as real. In March 1943, Alexandre Koyré wrote that the creators of totalitarian propaganda, from the time of the first publication of Mein Kampf, always announced their program of action publicly, knowing that public opinion would never take seriously their persecutory and destructive declarations. Koyré’s hypothesis seems to me to be enlightening in the case of the propaganda and the falsifications of the anti-Semites. Anti-Semitic propaganda states a fact that never happened and falsifies the evidence that would demolish it, yet it tells the truth about its own persecutory intentions because its authors were certain that they were able to deceive public opinion and even those who did not believe it: non servatur fides infidelibus. Therefore, the lie about the Jewish conspiracy concealed a real “conspiracy in broad daylight,” wrote Koyré, hatched by the anti-Semitic and totalitarian movements, an authentic plot which had to gain “the trust of the masses” that, for this reason, could not hide: “The conspiracy in broad daylight, if it was not a secret society, was nevertheless a society with a secret.”26 In such a society, distinguishing between the truth and falsehood, thus holding the power of judgment and decision making, was exclusively reserved to a very restricted elite, at the level of both social movements and the political regime. The propaganda of the anti-Semitic movements and the totalitarian regimes was, in this sense, “conspiracies in broad daylight” knowingly based on falsification. The elite knew both the art of the effective lie (in order to manipulate the psychology of the masses) and the art of revealing the truth of their plan of persecution. Contemporary negationists do the same things and invent even more new myths with the aim of demolishing the acquisition of historical knowledge by stratagems and rhetorical devices that are not unlike those of the propagandists and forgers who preceded them: reductivism, relativization, manipulation, interpolation, negation. Reductivism and manipulation and denying the truth of proven and confirmed facts, were characteristic of prewar anti-Jewish propaganda and falsification; now they are practiced by those who deny the truth of the persecution and extermination. At the same time, negationist rhetoric has inherited from anti-Semitic propaganda the same mania of explaining everything: for Hitler’s national socialism onward, the contrast between Christian Aryan Europe and Judaism represented the fulcrum of the history of the world and constituted the justification “for the function of salvation” of the Nazis’ mission; for the negationist ideologues and the aberrant heirs of the ideological drifts of anti-Jewish anticapitalism, all the social systems of the twentieth century have been variants of a single imperialist plot.27 The concentration camp was the instrument used by the Nazis to exercise their power, but according to the negationists, it was not qualitatively different from other forms of imperialist exploitation. In order to support this thesis, the negationists falsify and eliminate the facts that would make their claim a lie; they even overturn the relationship between reality and unreality. Their procedure does not consist therefore in fabricating false evidence or false documents but rather stating the reality of what has never happened (or in declaring that what really happened is not true). Hence, to the negationists, history is never real. On the one hand, they state something that has never been historically true, namely, that the Nazi system was only a variant of imperialism; on the other hand, the assertion that Auschwitz constitutes a “lie” enables them to overturn a historically proven truth into a phantom.28 Propaganda, falsification, and negation all have in common the violation of the method of rigorous verification of the facts. Essentially, they eliminate the very notion of reality. They abolish logical verification or evidence as the means by which a thesis is verified. But the starting point to arrive at a historical truth must remain the reality of the facts, weighed up with definite evidence: propaganda and falsification, which ignore or distort the reality of verified facts, are typical procedures of the violation of the principle of reality and, therefore, of the possibility of pursuing the truth.29 Justice—however one defines it—also cannot ignore the rational procedures of ascertaining the facts through evidence: therefore, it also presupposes correct procedures. The justness of the procedures constitutes the precondition for just decisions (for example, in a trial), and the procedures have to be in harmony with the spirit that informs the highest principles of the judicial system. Indeed, the aim of a criminal lawsuit, like that of historiographical research, consists in the ideal of the search for the truth. The procedures and rules that the law defines are correctly applied to the case in question only when they are found to be fully appropriate to the case, the law is correctly interpreted, and, finally, the facts are verified: the category of truth, understood as a statement corresponding with the fully verified facts, is therefore immanent in the correct procedural application and in the concept of justice as in the concept of history.30 To seek and write historical truth also means to continue to render justice. The information-technology revolution has made possible the globalization of communications but has also increased the risks of confusion between reality and unreality. The deniers of historical reality, who try to eliminate the difference between the truth and lies, want to ensure the retrospective victory of those who were defeated militarily and politically in 1945: the anti-Semites. Today, the strategy is not that of repressing or stifling the truth as in the despotic regimes wiped out in 1945, but of making it unrecognizable and indistinguishable from falsehood. In the negation of the principle of reality, “Hitler survives, and no one can say with certainty whether he is dead or he saved himself.”31